I have found myself quite interested in this thought of compatibility or companion-ability (I am sure that this is not the word that Dr. Williamson has used, but it is close.) In other words, this is the idea that, perhaps a narrow or burgeoning group of women and men, from what we see in Edmund, were beginning to demonstrate during this time period. In the third volume, the reader finds Fanny caught between choosing to accept the advances from the very charming, proper, and wealthy Mr. Crawford and her own cousin, raised virtually as he brother, Edmund.
Perhaps, a precursor in this dense and thorough thicket of prose appears at the juncture when Fanny mentions the “Spirit of Improvement abroad.” Well, what exactly is she talking about here? It seems as though there is an advancement of tor enlightenment of ideas and ideologies that is taking place abroad, but not yet reaching the borders of MansfieldPark. When someone is aware or conscious of the fact that these instances are occurring elsewhere and then categorizing them as improvements, a logical line of thinking my indicate that this individual has decided to subscribe or would like to subscribe to such ideologies.
With this in mind, Fanny refers to a specific improvement, which she frames as the difference between reading and preaching. It is interesting that she makes this distinction. What does that mean for this time because it is a prevalent theme or thought within the religious community today, but interesting to find here? However, I think that she is drawing a parallel with the execution of what it means to love or execute the process to love or marry someone. In other words, Crawford reads the surroundings of the society or culture, and he does everything the right way and obtains all of the accoutrements needed to woo a women like Fanny. However, Edmund is introduced as the preacher of improvement here because he learns to not only read the societal norms of the times, but he preaches them, meaning he criticizes them, he challenges them, but he also finds a way to respect them.
Inheriting Pride & Prejudice - Sense & Sensibility in Mansfield Park
The theme that seems to undergird Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is the existence of prejudice and pride and/or the loss of sense and sensibility effacing the enlightenment. Austen is able to capture the dramatic nuances of the British mind on the brink between a continued tradition of slavery and injustice or freedom and equality - in a corrupt and prejudice system that commodifies individuals, where not only the slave but the slaveholder suffers tremendously. One might even say that this is a slaveholder’s narrative, told through the gaze of the Cinderella-esque, indentured slave – Fanny. Even though this text is not directly stating this, it is apparent that everything that happens in Mansfield Park is linked directly/indirectly to the slave trade.
The existence of the primogeniture system where the eldest son inherits everything from the father poses a huge problem. This factor is a reason why one would choose to marry someone or not. If an eldest son is due to receive the financial inheritance from his father’s estate, then it automatically commodifies his relationships with women and his interactions with those who collude in this systematic process which allows the eldest son to receive the goods from his father. Therefore, an inheritance that once might have been embraced is now denounced. This method of inheritance does come at a cost; it is not without loss or decay. Indeed, it can become problematic. In the case of Mansfield Park, Tom Bertram could inherit his father’s estate, which is supported and funded by the father’s financial holdings in an Antiguan plantation. Also, his choice to pursue his own desires are lost and therefore his creativity and natural artistic ability are removed from his immediate existence.
Austen also presents the good brother bad brother motif within Mansfield Park, which plays a significant role in the reader’s understanding and the development of ideas surrounding pride and prejudice. Tom is of course, the bad brother, agitating the systematic process that has already provided a very posh place for him to exert his manhood and position within the society, but unfortunately, he rejects those prescribed and reinforced demands and creates his own path that reminds me in many ways of the prodigal son from the Bible. They both go off to the city and squander their inheritances on sex, drugs, and alcohol. However, where the Biblical character returns home, much to the father’s hope, Tom in Mansfield Park utterly rejects the slave system, showing how the infested structure can corrupt and cause tension in those who inherit or criticize it. What I think is interesting is that Austen does not tell of his experiences in Antigua. The mere reference of the Caribbean Island is a magical and mystical apparition when mentioned in the text. It is almost as if the reader has to imagine the conditions, the extreme dehumanization, and conscious shame of the interdependence of such actions that drive Tom into a drunken stupor, unable to communicate about his experiences in ways that would drive the rest of the characters out of their disconnected, ignorant, and prideful states and into a place of enlightenment. Tom’s character is tragic because he has not fully transcended that position at his juncture.
The father, on the other hand, is, in some ways hopeless when it comes to change. He is inalterable, so to speak, and he has already sold his soul to this system which commodifies people and festers into his own family by causing financial instability or dependence upon a financial structure that does not take into consideration its effects on the human condition and the dehumanization of the soul. For as the wealth may make one comfortable, the deep injustices of the structural condition have to shape and distort the soul in ways that may not manifest immediately, but ultimately seek to destroy it. For this reason, the corrupt mind must create a world where sense and sensibility are destroyed and ignorance prevails. It is, perhaps, for this reason Austen decides to entitle the book, Mansfield Park, instead of Fanny or some other name. It is not about her, per se, but it is about the lives of people and how they are affected by the institution of slavery on the home-front. Even though they are thousands of miles away from the New World in the West, the class system that it creates globally causes individuals to think and perform unnaturally. The father is the ultimate representation of this, but his other son, Edmund, also rejects this inheritance, yet in a different manner.
Edmund is the consummate figure of hope in Mansfield Park. Although he thinks that he is in love with Ms. Crawford, he begins to work through the commodified or temporal method of determining what love or at least marriage should be like, dare I say plenitude? Even if this theory does not measure up or falter, at times, he undoubtedly, he incites or invites thoughts and actions of modernity when he does not have to do so. We like him as a character because, just as in the Cain and Abel story, Edmund offers up the right sacrifice, which is himself. He does not allow the limitations or destructive systems to destroy him. Whereas Abel’s blood cries out from the ground when he is murdered by his jealous brother, Mansfield Park desperately cries out for someone to disinherit the pride and prejudice with a sense of sensibility – rage against a “society of unequals,” which is how slave theorist, David Brion Davis, refers to this circulating ideology of the time, not only by whites but permeating thorough converging cultures throughout the Atlantic and imperialized nations.
Perhaps, a precursor in this dense and thorough thicket of prose appears at the juncture when Fanny mentions the “Spirit of Improvement abroad.” Well, what exactly is she talking about here? It seems as though there is an advancement of tor enlightenment of ideas and ideologies that is taking place abroad, but not yet reaching the borders of Mansfield Park. When someone is aware or conscious of the fact that these instances are occurring elsewhere and then categorizing them as improvements, a logical line of thinking my indicate that this individual has decided to subscribe or would like to subscribe to such ideologies.
With this in mind, Fanny refers to a specific improvement, which she frames as the difference between reading and preaching. It is interesting that she makes this distinction. What does that mean for this time because it is a prevalent theme or thought within the religious community today, but interesting to find here? However, I think that she is drawing a parallel with the execution of what it means to love or execute the process to love or marry someone. In other words, Crawford reads the surroundings of the society or culture, and he does everything the right way and obtains all of the accoutrements needed to woo a women like Fanny. However, Edmund is introduced as the preacher of improvement here because he learns to not only read the societal norms of the times, but he preaches them, meaning he criticizes them, he challenges them, but he also finds a way to respect them.
Inheriting Pride & Prejudice - Sense & Sensibility in Mansfield Park
The theme that seems to undergird Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is the existence of prejudice and pride and/or the loss of sense and sensibility effacing the enlightenment. Austen is able to capture the dramatic nuances of the British mind on the brink between a continued tradition of slavery and injustice or freedom and equality - in a corrupt and prejudice system that commodifies individuals, where not only the slave but the slaveholder suffers tremendously. One might even say that this is a slaveholder’s narrative, told through the gaze of the Cinderella-esque, indentured slave – Fanny. Even though this text is not directly stating this, it is apparent that everything that happens in Mansfield Park is linked directly/indirectly to the slave trade.
The existence of the primogeniture system where the eldest son inherits everything from the father poses a huge problem. This factor is a reason why one would choose to marry someone or not. If an eldest son is due to receive the financial inheritance from his father’s estate, then it automatically commodifies his relationships with women and his interactions with those who collude in this systematic process which allows the eldest son to receive the goods from his father. Therefore, an inheritance that once might have been embraced is now denounced. This method of inheritance does come at a cost; it is not without loss or decay. Indeed, it can become problematic. In the case of Mansfield Park, Tom Bertram could inherit his father’s estate, which is supported and funded by the father’s financial holdings in an Antiguan plantation. Also, his choice to pursue his own desires are lost and therefore his creativity and natural artistic ability are removed from his immediate existence.
Austen also presents the good brother bad brother motif within Mansfield Park, which plays a significant role in the reader’s understanding and the development of ideas surrounding pride and prejudice. Tom is of course, the bad brother, agitating the systematic process that has already provided a very posh place for him to exert his manhood and position within the society, but unfortunately, he rejects those prescribed and reinforced demands and creates his own path that reminds me in many ways of the prodigal son from the Bible. They both go off to the city and squander their inheritances on sex, drugs, and alcohol. However, where the Biblical character returns home, much to the father’s hope, Tom in Mansfield Park utterly rejects the slave system, showing how the infested structure can corrupt and cause tension in those who inherit or criticize it. What I think is interesting is that Austen does not tell of his experiences in Antigua. The mere reference of the Caribbean Island is a magical and mystical apparition when mentioned in the text. It is almost as if the reader has to imagine the conditions, the extreme dehumanization, and conscious shame of the interdependence of such actions that drive Tom into a drunken stupor, unable to communicate about his experiences in ways that would drive the rest of the characters out of their disconnected, ignorant, and prideful states and into a place of enlightenment. Tom’s character is tragic because he has not fully transcended that position at his juncture.
The father, on the other hand, is, in some ways hopeless when it comes to change. He is inalterable, so to speak, and he has already sold his soul to this system which commodifies people and festers into his own family by causing financial instability or dependence upon a financial structure that does not take into consideration its effects on the human condition and the dehumanization of the soul. For as the wealth may make one comfortable, the deep injustices of the structural condition have to shape and distort the soul in ways that may not manifest immediately, but ultimately seek to destroy it. For this reason, the corrupt mind must create a world where sense and sensibility are destroyed and ignorance prevails. It is, perhaps, for this reason Austen decides to entitle the book, Mansfield Park, instead of Fanny or some other name. It is not about her, per se, but it is about the lives of people and how they are affected by the institution of slavery on the home-front. Even though they are thousands of miles away from the New World in the West, the class system that it creates globally causes individuals to think and perform unnaturally. The father is the ultimate representation of this, but his other son, Edmund, also rejects this inheritance, yet in a different manner.
Edmund is the consummate figure of hope in Mansfield Park. Although he thinks that he is in love with Ms. Crawford, he begins to work through the commodified or temporal method of determining what love or at least marriage should be like, dare I say plenitude? Even if this theory does not measure up or falter, at times, he undoubtedly, he incites or invites thoughts and actions of modernity when he does not have to do so. We like him as a character because, just as in the Cain and Abel story, Edmund offers up the right sacrifice, which is himself. He does not allow the limitations or destructive systems to destroy him. Whereas Abel’s blood cries out from the ground when he is murdered by his jealous brother, Mansfield Park desperately cries out for someone to disinherit the pride and prejudice with a sense of sensibility – rage against a “society of unequals,” which is how slave theorist, David Brion Davis, refers to this circulating ideology of the time, not only by whites but permeating thorough converging cultures throughout the Atlantic and imperialized nations.